Rising fascism in the US

Asked in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business in May about the possibility that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could assume the presidency if Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were to fall ill, the president scoffed at the idea.

"We'll keep our vice president very healthy and I'll stay healthy," he said. "Never going to happen."

In August, talking about masks, he said, "Maybe they’re great, and maybe they’re just good. Maybe they’re not so good.”

In a White House briefing just last month, Trump was asked why he doesn't wear a mask to set an example, instead of encouraging supporters who view rules requiring masks as a violation of personal freedom.

Once again, he mocked Biden.

"Well, I'm tested, and I'm sometimes surprised when I see somebody sitting and -- like, with Joe. Joe feels very safe in a mask. I don't know, maybe he doesn't want to expose his face," Trump said on Sept. 16. "There's no reason for him to have masks on."

"We get tested -- I'm tested. I have people tested. When people come into the Oval Office, it's like a big deal. No matter who they are -- if they're heads of countries, they all get tested. So I'm in sort of a different position. And maybe if I wasn't in that position, I'd be wearing it more," he continued.

They made a myriad of unintentional and intentional mistatements...

...but THEIR errors, miscalculations, and lies were protected speech...

...while others’ were reason for censorship, government scrutiny, job loss, and social media ban.

A lot of people on social media were censured, censored, and banned temporarily and permanently for arguing with the government narrative on vaccines, and for disputing numbers and data methodology used by the CDC, and accusing the CDC of being manipulated by the Trump and Biden administrations, for a few examples.

People who I am associated with across several platforms and I experienced these unwarranted intrusions into our interactions.

Plenty of law enforcement, teachers, school support staff, and medical personnel who didn’t feel comfortable getting vaxxed were fired.

(The US is moving more toward the authoritarian China model.)

That is precisely my point.

They made a myriad of unintentional and intentional mistatements, but THEIR errors, miscalculations, and lies were protected speech, while others’ were reason for censorship, government scrutiny, job loss, and social media ban.

Lash and Builder constantly bad mouth the BBC and its reporters.

The hypocrisy is outstanding.

Lash wrote:

I think both terms are made-up horseshit to chill speech. The Trump and Biden administrations, the CDC, and Dr Fauci can all be legitimately accused of various errors in speaking—mistakes, lies, cover-ups, and manipulative speech.

Is there anyone on this planet other than yourself that you think CANNOT be legitimately accused of various errors in speaking--mistakes, lies, cover-ups, and manipulative speech?

You doubt what you can’t understand, Frank. You’re too deeply mired in propaganda to look out at other perspectives. My view is widely shared by a subset of people outside your bubble who are furious at what’s happening in this country. You love what’s happening because your blue team seems to score points occasionally, so you feel *you* scored points. I’m sure anything that causes you to look past that tidy illusion is evil in your eyes. The progressives who recognize that the Squad and Bernie have gone establishment Dem are right here with me.

As I said, a lot of people came to the same conclusions I have—just not shitlibs. Even the conservatives see it, they just don’t agree with our political solutions.

Jaded means we’ve learned from paying attention over a very long time, and negative means the country and the world are currently in the shitter.

Current reality in this country and the world sucks. That doesn’t make me ignore it. But I definitely can see why you and your little friends like to post a lot about Trump and the other little political distractions that make you feel like you actually have some chance to win some little meaningless political victory while the world burns. Neither of us will win anything at the end of the day.

The exponential increase in our surveillance state, primarily.

(...)

As it happened, the 1980s and 1990s were a major turning point in surveillance, the period when companies went on their first buying sprees for electronic performance-monitoring. In 1987 approximately six million workers were watched in some kind of mediated way, generally a video camera or audio recorder; by 1994, roughly one in seven American workers, about 20 million, was being electronically tracked at work. The numbers steadily increased from there. When videotape technology was supplanted by digital devices that could scan multiple locations at once, the cameras first installed to protect businesses from theft shifted their insatiable gaze from the merchandise to the workers.

The second big turning point in electronic performance-monitoring is happening right now. It’s driven by wearable tech, artificial intelligence, and Covid. Corporations’ use of surveillance software increased by 50 percent in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, according to some estimates, and has continued to grow.

This new tracking technology is ubiquitous and intrusive. Companies track for security, for efficiency, and because they can. They inspect and preserve and analyze movements, conversations, social connections, and affect. If the first surveillance expansion was a territorial grab, asserting authority over the whole person at work, the second is like fracking the land. It is changing the structural composition of how humans relate to one another and to themselves.

Some long-haul truckers have to drive a fifty-foot flatbed truck six hundred miles a day with a video camera staring them down the entire time, watching their eyes, their knuckles, their twitches, their whistles, their neck movements. Imagine living in front of that nosy boss-face camera for months on end as it scans your cab, which serves as your home most of the time. On one of many angry Reddit forums about driver-facing cameras, a trucker wrote that he’d put up with one only “if the company owner gives me a 24/7 unrestricted stream in to his house.” “Those few hundred miles a day is the only time I completely have to myself and I feel as if it is being tainted,” added another. “I just want to pick my nose and scratch my balls in peace man.” A bus driver described the human desire to

pull a weird face or talk to yourself or sing along with a song….

I could feel how much less cortisol was flowing through my body in my second job where the buses were older and did not have cameras inside. It makes you unhealthy and run down.

Employers read employees’ e-mails, track their Internet use, and listen to their conversations. Nurses and warehouse workers are forced to wear ID badges, wristbands, or clothing with chips that track their movements, measuring steps and comparing them to coworkers’ and the steps taken yesterday.

The wristbands that now commonly encircle your skin, caressing your median nerve, might in the future be used to send signals back to you or your employer, measuring how many minutes you spend in the bathroom. Amazon, which minutely tracks every moment of a warehouse worker’s activity, every pause and conversation, has a patent for a wristband that would, the Times reported, “emit ultrasonic sound pulses and radio transmissions to track where an employee’s hands were in relation to inventory bins” and then vibrate to steer the worker toward the correct bin. A “SmartCap” used in trucking monitors brainwaves for weariness.

(...)

All of this is demoralizing and dystopian, but what does it have to do with democracy? Elizabeth Anderson’s lively and persuasive 2017 book, Private Government, offers a partial answer. Anderson, a political philosopher at the University of Michigan, shakes the reader by the shoulders to get us out of the strange rigidity that pervades public discussion of government. Employment is a form of government, she argues, one that is far more relevant and immediate for most people than the Washington, D.C., kind.

A powerful company like Amazon, for instance, sets its own terms of employment—and in so doing impacts those of UPS drivers and the broader logistics industry. Private employers with industry-wide influence have coercive power—what Anderson calls governing power. Private government, personified by private guilds or by state-sanctioned economic monopolies in soap, salt, and leather, was the central target of intellectuals and activists like John Locke and the Levellers. Anderson sees in Locke, Adam Smith, and others a belief that the arbitrary power to debase and discipline is a threat to a free society, wherever it appears, and that public, accountable government should protect against private tyranny.

Many modern “thinkers and politicians,” she argues, are “like those patients who cannot perceive one-half of their bodies”: they “cannot perceive half of the economy: they cannot perceive the half that takes place beyond the market, after the employment contract is accepted.” As a result, companies are generally treated as wholly private.

Many private-sector workers, Anderson writes, live under

dictatorships in their work lives. Usually, those dictatorships have the legal authority to regulate workers’ off-hour lives as well—their political activities, speech, choice of sexual partner, use of recreational drugs, alcohol, smoking, and exercise.

For her, service workers who clock out, or technicians and realtors and cooks who seem endowed with substantial freedoms, are burdened by a legal system that allows corporations to fire a worker based on off-the-clock activity.

The speech rights of workers are practically nonexistent except as they explicitly relate to labor organizing, which, Anderson argues, is effectively a dead letter these days because of the difficulty of enforcement and the fear of challenging the boss’s tactics.

How did things get so bad? Anderson believes the root issues that enabled the current dystopian workplace go back generations. When the Industrial Revolution shifted the “primary site of paid work from the household to the factory,” it imported the long tradition of wholly arbitrary power within the household, in which children did not have freedom vis-à-vis their parents, and wives had limited freedom vis-à-vis their spouses. The Industrial Revolution could have provided an escape from the private tyrannies of home life, but instead it replicated them.

During the heyday of the Ford Motor Company, its Sociological Department began inspecting workers’ homes. Anderson writes:

Workers were eligible for Ford’s famous $5 daily wage only if they kept their homes clean, ate diets deemed healthy, abstained from drinking, used the bathtub appropriately, did not take in boarders, avoided spending too much on foreign relatives, and were assimilated to American cultural norms.

Anderson points out that while Apple does not visit people’s homes today, it does require retail workers to open their bags for inspections before coming into work. We take this for granted, she notes, but should we? Nearly half of Americans have undergone a suspicionless drug test. And many workers have no protection from getting fired for what they say on social media. To those who claim the workplace isn’t government because you can quit, Anderson retorts, “This is like saying Mussolini wasn’t a dictator, because Italians could emigrate.”

Current reality in this country and the world sucks. That doesn’t make me ignore it. But I definitely can see why you and your little friends like to post a lot about Trump and the other little political distractions that make you feel like you actually have some chance to win some little meaningless political victory while the world burns. Neither of us will win anything at the end of the day.